jason thurber's blog

Vacation?
A quick rundown: Started in Auckland, went to the Bay of Islands (4 hrs to the north). Stayed at an excellent B&B for 2 days, spent a day sailing on a 60-something foot sailboat. Drove down to Waitomo (8hrs south… ouch), beginning to feel quite worn out from all this vacat’ing. Stayed at a farmstay for one night (very nice, got to do a bit of rally-style driving at night on 12+ km’s on gravel road :). Went to the glowworm caves at Waitomo (which was surprisingly cool). Drove to some volcanic park, it was raining so we flipped a U-turn and drove to Taupo Lake (very much like NZ’s answer to Lake Tahoe) where we’ve been for the last 2 days (now that’s more like a vacation). I’ve got something like 1.3gb of photos (and most of them are pretty good, not all pictures of bathroom-humour-type signs, which is something of a departure for me). We’re heading back to Auckland this morning to meet up with our travelling companions. We’ll try and hit the Auckland Zoo before we leave and see a real Kiwi (the bird, not the fruit, we saw the fruit at Pak n’ Save yesterday). Then it’s back on the plane to the land of left-hand drive…

Well, 13hrs of quality seat time later we’re in New Zealand. Unlike SF which was raining and overcast when I left it’s rainy, humid and overcast here. Plus they drive on the “wrong” side which, compounded by the rain and jetlag, has turned me into exactly the sort of driver I love to make fun of in the states? Well, isn’t that why we travel anyway, to give other cultures the opportunity to feel superior?

Seriously, from the point we left the ground in LAX everyone has been really (perhaps even suspiciously?) nice (a bit difficult to parse at times, but still nice). The customs agent in Auckland actually said “Good on ya’ mate” to me (after telling me which line to get into) which made my morning.

We grabbed showers in the hotel room of the couple we’re meeting here and went out for the requisite “American abroad” experience in the 21st century. That’s right, Starbucks! It tasted just like home… We then ate Kebabs (pronounced Kee-baabs, no ka or bob in the word over here) and saw Johnny English (the new Bond movie spoof) which was just the right speed for today. As an aside: it is my deeply held belief that the first day in a _totally wrong_ timezone should be taken as easily as possible, if at all.

Not a bad start the jet-lag is unnoticable (perhaps this can be attributed to my unusually low/normal when I left the states after a week+ of working WAY too many hours) and I haven’t wrecked the rental car yet. Oh well, there’s plenty of time left in the trip.

More worrying developments re: our “liberties” (such of them as remain). I saw the initial rumblings about this earlier today and thought about commenting, but decided “nah, there’s no way this will pass”. There I go, underestimating the power of fear on the hearts and minds of our appointed representatives.

What am I rambling about you may now (justifiably) be asking. This (House votes on Net porn), which I just saw on the CNET News feed. A snippet:

Pence’s amendment said that anyone who uses a misleading domain name to try to lure people into visiting an obscene Web site faces up to two years in prison … It applies to all domain names around the globe, even those in other countries and ending in suffixes such as .nl or .uk.

It’s not that I am in favor of misleading domain names (tho’ trying to get to the White House web-site the first time was an adventure, and may be an education for children on their usual relationship to the government), it’s that this vague and dangerous legislation is being passed under the guise of something relevant.

I recently got into an argument with a friend regarding the child-abduction alerts that are shown around the Bay Area with (very disturbing) regularity. After seeing three of them over the course of a few days I questioned whether these are all “stranger abductions”, or are some of these “parental abductions”. She wanted to know what I thought the difference was. I said that, basically, I don’t care about “parental abductions” (at this point I should definitely qualify the term, by “parental abduction” I am speaking of that stage in the divorce where Mommy decides Daddy shouldn’t ever see the kids again, and Daddy decides “f@#* that”, picks them up from school one day and does a runner). Unless the parent is violent, mentally unbalanced (to an unusual degree) or for some other reason a threat to the children (which is different from being a threat to our legal system) I don’t see how it’s any of my business. On the other hand, if I can help catch a “stranger abductor” I’m all for it. I can think of no more henious crime! My concern was that the “Amber Alert” system not be usurped by some blended system that both enforces the will of the courts and helps find “stranger abducted” children. One I consider of the highest importance, while the other (transferring possession of children from one parent to the other) is a job for the police and the courts.

My point? Just that this is more noise and fear-mongering in a time when that is really the last thing we need.

Saw this on Lockergnome Bytes just now. Reminds me of Junior (not one of Arnold’s finer moments).

I’ve started using emacs as my main XML/XSLT editor/browser. It’s awesome! After spending a few days inadvertently mangling files (rather like when I started using vi) I’ve gotten the hang of it and am _much_ more productive. I’ve found that with a lot of “power user” targeted products (e.g. all the *nix editors) that there’s some inverse relationship between the amount of pain they cause you while you’re learning them, and the amount of value and pleasure they provide/energy you spend evangelizing them once you’ve invested a little time learning them.

If you spend most of your working day manipulating plain text files in any form (be they html, xml or code in some form) (and if you aren’t already proficient in vi) I heartily recommend spending a day or so with emacs.

The three major timesavers I’ve found so far –
1) Ctrl + Space marks the beginning of a section, then Ctrl + w cuts that section into the buffer. If you’re a fan of the “new” windows multi-clipboard interface (which, I think, started in Office 2000) then you’ll really love “yanking” from the emacs “kill buffer”.
2) Ctrl + h followed by “a” puts you in “apropos” help mode. If you enter a portion of a command then emacs help will perform a regexp search and find commands containing that text. Useful if you want to learn a little about a topic without reading thru the manual (which is available under the help menu if you’re interested).
3) Recording keyboard macros that contain other keyboard macros. This is totally cool!

Thanks to Scott for encouraging me to spend the time to learn the emacs basics.

This is great stuff! I can’t say it any better than Gabe (his comment is towards the bottom of the page).

That’s really all I have to show for today except for lots of “Zug-zug”.

I said that there was “nothing exciting to report”. That is entirely true, however here’s a short list of unexciting things to report:

First, b2 is one of the easier pieces of software I’ve ever configured. The only hurdle was determining what strategy my ISP uses to name MySQL databases and users, which is hardly b2’s fault.
Second, that first post was actually posted from my Treo 300 while sitting on the couch. Just thought that was cool (however miserable the content of the post).
Third, I added my blog’s RSS feed to Syndirella without any additional configuration work.

The main task remaining is to personalize the appearance of my blog (and site in general). I suppose I should also try to add some content other than annoying “First post”-type blogs and blogs about blogging…

Well, got b2 set up. Nothing exciting to report beyond that. More to follow.